Špalíček (H.214) is Bohuslav Martinů's three-act 'ballet-revue' built from Czech folk games, customs and fairytales, completed in 1932 and premiered at the National Theatre in Prague in 1933 with the credited choreography of Joe Jenčík (a credit the source article itself does not confirm — see uncertainties). Its title refers to eighteenth-century Bohemian chapbooks sold at fairs, and the piece strings together unrelated folk episodes — children's singing games, Puss in Boots, the Cobbler and Death, the legend of Dorothea, and Cinderella — in a format the composer modelled partly on Oskar Nedbal's 1908 pantomime ballet Z pohádky do pohádky.
What is danced
The article describes the work's dramaturgy and music in much more detail than its actual choreography, so what can be said about movement is structural rather than technical. The Prologue is built as a sequence of children's song-and-dance games in which 'the fairy tale action is danced while singers narrate the stories' — i.e. sung narration and danced enactment run side by side rather than the dancers carrying the plot alone. Within the same Prologue, Puss in Boots is treated 'again with much dance, but no chorus,' suggesting a shift from the choral games into a more purely danced episode, followed by three further children's games (the maidens, the water-sprite, the wolf). Act II, the Cobbler and Death, is described as 'mostly danced,' implying the tale is carried through mime and dance with minimal sung narration, in contrast to the sung-and-danced hybrid of the Prologue. Act III moves from the largely dramatic, non-danced killing of Dorothea to a change of mood that 'finishes with waltzes to be danced' at Cinderella's village wedding — the one place the article names an actual dance form.
No pointe work, character-shoe work, mime codes, or specific technique is described anywhere in the source, and the choreographer is not discussed at all — the article is a musicological account (Grove, Šafránek, Brian Large are all quoted on the score, none on the choreography). That absence matters for anyone trying to reconstruct the ballet's vocabulary: what can be documented from this source is the alternation of choral/sung numbers with fully danced ones, and a single named social dance (the wedding waltz) closing the whole work.
Context
Špalíček belongs to Martinů's major theatrical push of the early 1930s, alongside Hry o Marii and Divadlo za bránou, and the article suggests possible influence from his teacher Roussel's opéra-ballet Padmâvatî and from Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat — both works that mix spoken/sung narration with dance rather than relying on danced mime alone. Its episodic, folk-tale-to-folk-tale structure is credited to Nedbal's 1908 pantomime ballet Z pohádky do pohádky, situating Špalíček within a specifically Czech lineage of folklore-based stage dance rather than the Franco-Russian narrative-ballet tradition. The turn to village custom recurs across Martinů's later output (Kytice, Zbojnické písně, the folk cantatas of 1955–59), making Špalíček an early, large-scale stage statement of a lifelong preoccupation.
Staging history
The premiere was at the National Theatre, Prague, on 19 September 1933, conducted by Josef Charvát; a rival Brno production opened soon after and ran in repertory for four years. Martinů re-scored the original chamber-orchestra version for larger forces in 1940, trimming it from roughly two hours ten minutes to around 100 minutes and dropping the cantata The Spectre's Bride (originally its final part) because it made the evening too long; this revised version premiered at the Národní divadlo in Prague on 2 April 1949 under Václav Kašlík. The work has since been revived in Czechia and Slovakia and was recorded complete (Supraphon, 1988, Brno Philharmonic under František Jílek); orchestral suites have been recorded separately by Jiří Waldhans (1979) and Charles Mackerras (1991).
How to watch it
Watch for the shifting relationship between chorus/soloist narration and the dancers: some episodes (the Prologue's singing games) are sung-while-danced, others (Puss in Boots, the Cobbler and Death) are carried almost entirely by movement, so the texture of sung-versus-danced storytelling changes act to act. The piece closes not on the tragic Dorothea episode but on a Cinderella wedding scene resolved in waltzes — a deliberate mood swing from grim legend to communal celebratory dance that the article flags as the work's structural pivot.
Structure
- Act PrologueA chorus of children plays four song-and-dance games (including the chicken-and-hen tale), followed by a heavily danced, chorus-free Puss in Boots episode and three more children's games (the maidens, the water-sprite, the wolf).
- Act II · The Cobbler and DeathAn old shoemaker, aided by a butterfly, frees a princess from a giant and wins a sack containing Death; the tale is described as mostly danced.
- Act III · Dorothea and CinderellaThe legend of Dorothea of Caesarea, who is killed by a crowd, gives way to a Czech-village Cinderella story that closes with waltzes danced at her wedding.
Structure read from an encyclopaedia article, not from a libretto or score we hold. Confirm against a programme before treating the numbering as authoritative.
Credits
- composer: Bohuslav Martinů